The 2 Best Plant Identification Apps

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Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? With an accurate plant-identification app installed on your phone, you won't have to guess.

Fourteen Wirecutter staffers located in nine states tested these apps on iPhones and Android phones.

To get a thorough cross-section of plants, we recruited testers living in a mix of rural and urban locations.

We tested on a wide range of plants, from familiar windowsill favorites to mysterious specimens we encountered in forests.

To weed out difficult apps, we asked our testers to report back on obnoxious ads, weird glitches, and setup problems.

The right app can help you connect with nature, participate in citizen science projects, and learn which plants are dangerous or invasive. Fourteen Wirecutter staffers and their families tested seven apps (all of them available free of charge) across nine states, in both rural and urban locations, using Android and Apple phones. If you simply want an app that will quickly and accurately identify plants, we recommend PlantNet Plant Identification. If you want an app that allows you to share your findings with other naturalists (whether they’re amateur or professional), we have a pick for you too.

If you need an immediate, accurate way to ID plants, without having to navigate confusing ads, this is the app for you. But it's lighter on background information than some other apps we tested.

If you just need quick, accurate plant identifications from an app that's simple to use, we recommend PlantNet Plant Identification (iOS, Android). Within five seconds, this app was able to differentiate a downy-yellow violet from an eastern redbud, a weeping forsythia from a tall goldenrod, and a maple from an oak. Unlike many of the apps we tried, PlantNet is not consumed with ads or sneaky pop-ups that trick you into paying for extra features. Although it doesn't offer as seamless a sharing experience as iNaturalist or as much plant background information as some of the other apps we tested, PlantNet provides quick, easy identifications that our testers found to be consistently accurate.

Along with identifying plants, this app makes it easy to share and confirm your findings with other observers, including both amateur and professional naturalists. However, this one is not as simple to use as our top pick.

For teachers, community educators, and citizen scientists who want to be able to identify plants they find as well as learn and share information about them, iNaturalist (iOS, Android) is the app we recommend. Expert researchers and other experienced users wander the app and confirm publicly shared identifications. It's also easy to create and participate in "citizen science" projects from within the app, whether your goal is to share observations with other amateur naturalists in your area or to assist expert researchers in obtaining a larger field of observations (the results of which sometimes end up in scientific journal articles). Though it did well in our accuracy testing, iNaturalist wasn't quite as accurate as PlantNet. It's also a little trickier to use.

If you need an immediate, accurate way to ID plants, without having to navigate confusing ads, this is the app for you. But it's lighter on background information than some other apps we tested.

I’ve been a journalist at Wirecutter since 2019, and in that time I’ve contributed to our early COVID-19 coverage, guides to patio umbrellas and drawing tablets, and pieces on the gritty guts of the Wirecutter process. I have a special interest in botany: I write a monthly DIY gardening column for Popular Science, created a botanical true crime podcast called Plant Crimes, send out a monthly newsletter that begins with a horticultural prompt, and keep an Instagram account documenting these projects and my own plants. I am also chair of the plant committee at my community garden. In college, I used iNaturalist in one of my classes and later did a podcast episode on how the creators of the app came up with strategies to protect endangered plants from poachers.

These apps are for anyone who sees a plant and wonders what its name is. You don't need a degree in botany—or, alternatively, to be total ignorant of the photosynthesizing branch of the tree of life—to enjoy a plant-identification app. These apps can help you identify weeds in your yard, avoid poison ivy or oak, and figure out the name of a flower that you’d like to see in your garden. The possibilities are endless. Asking why someone would use a free plant-identification app is like asking why someone would use a free search engine.

These apps are especially helpful for teachers and community education. For example, a conservation stewardship organization that I used to volunteer with in San Francisco held regular BioBlitzes, parties where people (especially children) try to find as many species as possible in a certain area. Plant-identification apps, or wildlife ID apps in general, can give the experience the feel of an Easter egg or scavenger hunt, rather than the eat-your-vegetables slog that poring over a guidebook might be for some potential naturalists.

This guide started at my desk. I installed every free plant-identification app I could find and then saw whether they could identify the well-lit jade plant on my windowsill. I used the same picture for every app. If the app didn't pass this simple test, I ruled it out. I also didn't test any apps that weren't available in both iOS and Android versions or any that had consistently low user ratings.

After that initial trial, plant identification became a company-wide project. Fourteen Wirecutter staffers and their families tested seven apps across nine states (California, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington), using Apple and Android phones. They reported back on the apps’ accuracy, ease of use, weird glitches (if any), and other crucial issues. I also tested all seven finalists on plants in my community garden in Brooklyn, New York.

We were quick to rule out apps that were overrun with obnoxious advertisements, especially those that are designed to make it seem like you have to pay to use the app at all (every app we tested was free). I visited a family member in the process of writing this guide, and he had a plant-identification app we had never discussed. He complained that he had accidentally paid for it, giving "permission" with his thumbprint. We immediately disqualified apps with this kind of business model.

If you need an immediate, accurate way to ID plants, without having to navigate confusing ads, this is the app for you. But it's lighter on background information than some other apps we tested.

If you’re looking for a free app that will accurately and quickly identify a plant—without bombarding you with ads or extraneous information—PlantNet Plant Identification is that app.

To identify a plant, you first take a picture of it by tapping the camera symbol in the app's bottom navigation bar, which calls up a big circle with a camera on it labeled "Touch to identify," with a smaller gallery circle right beside it. Touch the camera and up pops potential identifications, with comparable pictures from other users and a percentage that represents the probability that the app got the right species. You can press the "i" at the corner to get the plant's family, its genus, its common name(s), its International Union for Conservation of Nature status (that is, how at risk of extinction it may be), and links to any additional information the app can find. At the top of the app, you can navigate to the plant's Wikipedia page and other users’ observations. You can log in to record your findings or add them to "groups," if you wish to share them or make them public. But the app is also easy to use without logging in.

In our testing, both children and adults were able to easily use this app. The app creators say it can identify about 20,000 of the 360,000 species on the planet, which was generally good enough for our testers’ purposes, using plants in both urban and rural locales, across nine states. The app also ranks how certain it is of an ID, like a friend who knows their own fallibility.

PlantNet does not give more information than it promises: With PlantNet, you’re going to get the name of the plant and maybe a few more details. We saw the simplicity as a blessing, but other users might prefer more explanation. For users who are looking for additional info, PictureThis, another app we tested and liked, goes into much more depth on subjects like toxicity and natural history (though Picture This was less user-friendly than either of our picks, and we found it was too easy to accidentally subscribe to paid features).

When you register for an optional PlantNet account, your name or username will be publicly displayed alongside any photo you take for licensing purposes, according to the terms of use. The app doesn't share data with third parties for advertising, but it does share information about photos for research purposes. Anonymous users share "species name, date and geolocation," according to Hugo Gresse, a mobile engineer for PlantNet. Users with an account share author name, images, and the aforementioned info. If you create an account, you’ll be sharing your photos under a CC by-SA license, which means that others (including people selling something) can use and adapt your photos. You might want to use your initials or make up a name rather than share your real moniker with the PlantNet community. If you prefer, however, it's also possible to use this app without logging in, as long as you’re not concerned about saving your observations. (You can just screenshot the identification for your own records and continue with your hike, gardening session, or whatever you’re doing.)

Covering plants and animals, iNaturalist (iOS, Android) is a proven entity. Created in 2008, the app has gained trust among educators, community organizers, scientists, and academics. This benefits even casual users of the app: Massive citizen science projects and experienced researchers using the app can confirm or dispute identifications of flora and fauna. (In our testing, however, we evaluated only its plant identifications, not animal ones.)

To make a new identification, you tap the camera symbol in the app's bottom navigation bar. You’re then presented with the option of looking up a plant by its name or a photo. If you don't know its name, you can take a photo of your mystery plant or upload an existing image from your phone's photo library. (There is also a "Record Sound" option, meant for identifying fauna, of course—we didn't test it for this guide.) The page where you enter the rest of your information is pleasantly simple. You can click "View Suggestions" to see what the app thinks you might have seen, based on other people's suggestions. You can also save your observations in the app and return to see any later comments either correcting or confirming your identifications.

Under the Managing Projects category, on the bottom far right of the screen, you can join other people's observation collections and look at featured and nearby groups. For example, at the time of writing, I can see the New York Botanical Garden's "New York City Plants of Conservation Concern" on my "nearby" screen.

A feature we thought would be particularly intriguing for amateur or budding scientists was the ability to share observations with professional researchers, to potentially be used in their work. In order for your observations to be available to researchers, they must qualify as "research grade." iNaturalist has four initial requirements for an ID to be verifiable, which is the first step to becoming research grade:

If all of these requirements are met, the observation then gets submitted for verification by other users on the app. If it receives enough verifications, the observation is elevated to "research grade," and it is made available to researchers to use in their work and even in scientific journal articles. You can also view other people's (usually research-grade) citizen science contributions arranged into groups, like the "Parasitic plants of the World."

Like PlantNet, iNaturalist is free. It is funded in the United States through the California Academy of Sciences, the National Geographic Society, and donations. iNaturalist says in its privacy policy that "iNaturalist will not rent or sell Personal Information to anyone."

The sharing features are helpful for those who want to combine their observations or check their observations against those of other users. In our testing, however, those who didn't want to use the sharing features sometimes found them to be distracting. "I thought the interface was a little clunky," said one tester. "I think that this is due to it being geared toward those who want more out of it than I do. It seems to be centered around the community aspect and people who really want to keep a standing record of their findings, where I’m just looking for straight-up plant ID as fast as I can."

If you’re a gardener in need of more plant details (but beware the risk of accidentally subscribing to more features): Consider PictureThis, which gives you more details per identification. These include popular cultivars, other people's pictures of the same plant, toxicity explanations, informative videos, a full description, and a "People Often Ask" section. You may even find poems! My simple snake plant brought up a verse by Lord Byron. There are a lot of other interesting tools on the app, including a "diagnose" feature, which helps you learn about your plant's ailments, as well as allergen and weed scanners. We thought this app might be useful if, for instance, you need to clean up an overrun garden. However, these advantages were overruled by two big red flags. The first presents itself the second you open the app: You hit a screen that shows an ad for PictureThis and then says "Try 7 days free, then $29.99/year." In the spot where your fingers would naturally press next, there is a big black-and-white "Continue" button. It's hard to spot the light gray "Cancel" button—which leads you to the free app—in the upper righthand corner. As mentioned above, we ruled out most apps that seemed designed to trick the user into buying something they didn't mean to. However, for some people this one might be worth the risk. The second issue was the privacy policy, which notes that, alongside collecting everything you actively upload to the app, it also collects and shares a lot of data for advertising.

Leafsnap had similar red flags to PictureThis with regard to accidental subscribing, and it was also not intuitive to operate. Our testers emphasized how annoying it was that the app did not save plant pictures that they took to their phones. "That's automatically a fail, because you have to exit the app to take the photo again to save it," one of our testers said. Another person said, "Ranking: PlantNet, anything that saves the photo automatically, Leafsnap."

Seek is iNaturalist's app for kids. While it is intuitive to use, we were disappointed with the (in)accuracy and general (in)competency of the app. Testers complained that the camera was finicky and that they would lose pictures they had just taken, and they overwhelmingly hammered its lack of accuracy. "It only ID’d maybe 15% of the total plants I tried," one tester said; I had a similar experience in my community garden. If you want to arm your children with knowledge of the natural world, our top pick should work well.

What's That Flower? was consistently clumsy. Everyone who tested the app reported that it took over a minute to enter a plant for identification, which is by far the worst performance of any app we tested.

Flora Incognita was confusing and generally inaccurate. One dedicated tester set up a comparison of PlantNet versus Flora Incognita with 22 plants he already knew: "Flora Incognita could only identify seven out of 22 plants with a high degree of accuracy. By comparison, my other go-to app PlantNet identified 15 out of 22 plants with a high degree of accuracy, and was able to list three other plants with a much lower degree of accuracy. I used the same 22 photos for both apps so that the comparison was fair across both."

This article was edited by Ria Misra and Christine Ryan.

Ellen Airhart

Ellen Airhart is an associate writer at Wirecutter, where she covers cleaning and emergency preparedness. Please email her with your biggest messes and most anxious thoughts.

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